The Writer Who Can’t Use A Typewriter
I started at the Western Hills Press community newspaper in the summer of 2001, a few weeks after graduating from high school. The little newsroom already had a formal intern but my dad said, in so many words, “if you can’t get in, don’t come back.” So a very gracious editor added a second, younger, nearly unpaid intern out of pity, and I have been wearing out keyboards professionally ever since.
Twenty two years times approximately 260 work days per year times roughly 500 words per day – though sometimes less, it often was more – works out to a career of about 2.8 million words so far. That doesn’t include the high school newspaper but it does include our independent daily student newspaper in college. Because nearly all of that 2.8 million was news, and thus perishable, very little of it had much value beyond the next few hours or days. We’re not talking about literature here – this was a simple matter of volume.
And yet I cannot use a typewriter.
I just can’t. Having come up in a peculiar time in which kids learned to type on the earliest home PCs and worn-out old command-line boxes in the middle school computer lab, my brain only knows how to work in a software environment.
In the old days it was Word Perfect, then Microsoft Word, then various newsroom front-end systems – ATEX, NewsEdit, NewsEngin – then Google Docs. What my brain learned was that in this metaphorical space, the hands would take down what it wished but that as soon as the time came to revise, it could do so immediately – as quickly as the composition. It designs the passage and builds it and revises it all in the same stream. Not only could it strike out whole lines or paragraphs to clear away the dross and keep working against a clean sheet, it could rearrange phrases and words even as they emerged from wherever they originate, the well of words deep in the cerebrum.
For example, I just wrote the words, “well of words deep in the cerebrum” and then wondered whether there’s any more specific way to describe that portion of the brain – or if indeed I was attributing correctly the center of formulation of language. So I took my right hand off the keyboard and moused up to the top of this Safari window and clicked the plus button to create a new tab. Then I typed “center of brain for language” into the bar and within .59 seconds, Google generated 392,000,000 results. This paragraph featured at the very top:
“Broca's area, located in the left hemisphere, is associated with speech production and articulation. Our ability to articulate ideas, as well as use words accurately in spoken and written language, has been attributed to this crucial area.”
Subsequent results told how the origins of writing in the brain actually involves more regions and isn’t as simple as pinpointing a specific blob of cells – nothing with the brain is simple.
What my brain learned at a crucial stage, and has come to rely upon, is that the metaphorical white page on the screen is an infinitely manipulable medium, and that almost no factual obstacle it encounters is untraversable. What’s 260 times 500 times 22? The brain wouldn’t even attempt that math on its own. The result is from Google. The brain can’t spell “exercise” or “reconnaissance” or “Mediterranean” correctly because it never had to learn how. Software in Google Docs corrects those and other words immediately, every time, and it nearly always has.
Writing can be difficult for everyone but the actual mechanics and much of the obtaining of important material has become so painless that, if it doesn’t go well, you can’t blame your tools.
When I try to work with a typewriter, all I do is blame the tool. I fight with it from the first keystroke. My brain wants to stop and recast a sentence in midstream, or rearrange words, or strike out a line, or spell “Connecticut” correctly, or start over. The brain wonders how many Chevrolet Corvairs were sold or wonders if it can find an explanation of U.S. Air Force boron-enhanced fuel programs in the 1950s. The typewriter offers nothing – and fights back like an overwrought toddler.
People say: It slows you down. Yes. There is virtue there. Slowing down is great for composing a few lines above Tintern Abbey.
I don’t disrespect typewriters. I appreciate the revolutionary role they played in American life. I love their clacking, buzzing, fragrant romance and their status as icon, totem, metaphor. And I like what they reveal about the artists and writers who use them to their greatest effect.
To wield a typewriter successfully requires a mind capable of steady, linear composition. It helps to have learned to type on one and had the feedback from the machine form part of the mental software necessary to make the best use of it. With those skills wired into the brain, the brain can then work in the correct way, at the correct speed, in order to render its – what’s a better word for “output”? not “effluvia,” but something like that, something suggesting the words oozing out – “outflow?” — via a mechanical contraption.
H.L. Mencken’s typescripts are very impressive in this regard. His typed words on the original page often appear almost exactly as they later did in his newspapers, or magazines, or books. Legions of other newspaper hacks spent still more decades torturing their machines in order to beat their deadlines for the following day’s morning edition. Some of them were still around in newsrooms well into the computer era and their own mental adaptations often made it clear how they’d gotten their start.
You could hear the difference in how they typed – on a mechanical typewriter you’re actuating a mechanical arm in order to lever up an inked letterform so that it strikes a sheet of paper. (I originally wrote “piece” of paper but immediately went back and made it “sheet” because that sounds better.) It takes some physical effort. We’re not talking about fashioning horseshoes here but if you don’t hit typewriter keys with at least a little oomph, you’re not going to write a thing.
Electric machines don’t take as much force but they didn’t come onto the scene until later. In the news game, when you used to sit next to someone who learned to work on a typewriter, you could tell when they were on a deadline – that poor keyboard sounded like a rock tumbler.
Nowadays many of us want that rock tumbler sound. I love my Logi MX Mechanical Mini keyboard, which doesn’t need to bap and rattle like a dot matrix printer, but it does … and I love my Das Keyboard 4 Professional, the Cadillac of mechanical keyboards, and I love watching all the YouTube videos about various other models, custom builds and the maturation of this input device into a wonderful kinesthetic musical instrument.
How real is the pseudo-science behind mechanical computer keyboards? Ostensibly the auditory feedback helps with typing accuracy. Having used too many keyboards for too many years to recount, I’m dubious – but I like the way that notion, probably from some marketing department, makes us feel like cognoscenti. At very least, in a newsroom or an office, a mechanical keyboard helps signal to people that you’re getting something done.
I enjoy seeing typewriters live on too, even if they’re not for me – I like how Tom Sachs used his to create place labels for his handmade map of Lower Manhattan … and I like how Austin Kleon uses his as a kind of high-texture, Hipstamatic-like label maker, and as a reading and study aid. In addition to the real, audible rattly voice of a typewriter, the silent one – in the sometimes weathered and eccentric letter shapes it creates – remains beautiful.